Jamoi Anderson Shares his Story at UTM
The award winning Paralympian talks about resilience and the way forward for accessible sports.
It’s not everyday a professional athlete comes to the sporting grounds of UTM. Last Friday on the 30th of January was one of those special occasions. UTM was proud to host Multi-bronze medalist Paralympian Jamoi Anderson, at the university. Anderson shared his story of resilience and engaged with students at the RAWC.
Anderson’s battle with illness
Jamoi Anderson was a regular kid just like anyone else. He came from a big family which consisted of 27 cousins. He recalls memories of a competitive sporting relationship between them. “We were always pushing each other to win, really. Even though it’s not always about winning, it’s about putting forth the effort,” he said. Anderson channeled this competitive spirit into basketball during high school and college.
One day he suddenly fell ill and on the fourth day of feeling this illness, he knew something was wrong. “I’m sitting on the couch right? I’m trying to reach for the remote on the coffee table and I can’t even reach for the remote. I’m frozen-ish. Ambulance came and took me to the hospital and later that night, I was in a coma. For twenty six days I was in a coma,” Anderson said. “To this day they don’t know what it was, some kind of infection was spread through my body via my blood,”
After getting out of the coma Anderson mentioned that his foot was heavily infected and doctors were debating how much of it they should cut off. Yet during all this, his first thought was, “Am I going to pick a basketball up again?”
Eventually he was discharged without amputation but needed daily wound care for his foot. This only lasted for so long. One day when doing his own wound dressing, his pinky toe fell off. “I had an appointment with a plastic surgeon and she would talk to me about a transplant and I was like, I’m ready to amputate,” Anderson said.
Back to the court
Anderson eventually amputated his left foot and soon got a prosthetic leg. He began attending rehab to learn a new way of life. “I was already back to the basketball court in a couple of days,” he said. During a game in Variety Village he was approached by former gold medalist Paralympian Jeff Tiessen who encouraged him to try adaptive sports. “ I was so focused on getting back to playing sports, I didn’t even think about using a wheelchair to play sports,” he added.
Through joining the Canadian Men’s Sitting Volleyball team back in 2012, Anderson helped the Canadian team to consecutive bronze medals at the Toronto 2015 and the Lima 2019 ParaPan American Games.
Wheelchair Basketball at UTM
After this talk about finding a new way to compete in sports, Jamoi Anderson had this to say about the RAWC and students playing wheelchair basketball. “I see the same smiles in you guys in the wheelchairs, the same smiles I see in people competing in regular sports. So I think that number one, wheelchair basketball can be just as competitive as regular basketball and silting volleyball is just as competitive as conventional volleyball.”
When asked about what he would like to see in Universities such as UTM to push accessible sports forward, he said that he would love intramural leagues for sports using adaptive devices. He pushed the idea that when competing at a high level, adaptive sports just become like any other sport and that there should be no difference between them.
After the talk and Q&A session, Anderson stayed back for an hour at the RAWC to talk with students and engage in some sports.
In one of his final remarks of the day, Anderson said, “In life you get five minutes, five minutes to soak in your feelings and for the rest of it, you got to be a gangster.”
